The idea for PLOrk came to Trueman when he arrived at Princeton as a doctoral student in 1995. After building spherical speakers to enhance the acoustical sound of his electric violin, he and his dissertation adviser, Perry Cook, added sensors to the violin bow that could feed sound into computers. The two then began to tinker and manipulate the sounds through their laptops. “That project was such a motivating factor,” Trueman recalls. Today, the “orchestra” consists of 15 performers at computer stations, each furnished with a sitting pillow, a laptop, a short multichannel spherical speaker and other devices, such as a keyboard pad.

Princeton students across all majors have been intrigued enough to enroll in the two classes required to join the orchestra. “One class is a prerequisite for the other, so they can come back,” Trueman says, adding that they can take the second class multiple times. “They could be here all four years, but we just haven’t been in existence that long.” Since these undergraduate classes are offered in the spring, now is PLOrk’s prime touring season.

Composing for the laptop can be murder, Trueman says, even though he gets plenty of outside help from electronic composers like Geers. The works certainly aren’t all kitsch, either: On a conventional piece, Trueman conducts the performers while they read music. On other, less-structured pieces, the players can improvise within a set of guidelines and cues, which Trueman equates to playing a computer game. It’s one thing to fix a broken string on a violin, but coordinating 15 laptops musically without having a system crash? It’s always a minor miracle, but something audiences take for granted.

Trueman cites influences from predecessors like the Hub, a forward-thinking, late-’80s electronic sextet that coaxed wild sounds out of its networked computers. Yet PLOrk’s own influence is slowly being felt across the world, with the arrival of the Tokyo, Moscow and now Stanford Laptop Orchestras.

Two-and-a-half years after PLOrk went live, Trueman still marvels at the sheer creativity that flowers within his ensemble. As he describes another premiere for Saturday’s show—Princeton senior John Fontein’s “Etch-A-PLOrk”—he can barely keep his enthusiasm in check. “He uses this built-in motion sensor to read data from the software and to control sound by tilting or tapping the laptop,” Trueman says with a chuckle. “And you have to shake it just like an Etch-a-Sketch to clear the screen.”

PLOrk plays the Sonic Divergence Festival at Northwestern University’s Pick-Staiger Concert Hall Saturday 5.

Listen to these sound clips from PLOrk:

In/Still

Idle Swamp

Sound Scatter

More Specific Gamelan Djembe Fusion

A Guy Walks into a Modal Bar—Movements 1 and 2

A Guy Walks into a Modal Bar—Movement 3

On The Floor

PLahara—Basic Laraha